![]() ![]() ![]() (It wasn’t.) He called his project-the world's first scientific SETI experiment-Ozma.īack in my Green Bank days, I would gesture at this telescope from the tour bus, say a whiz-bang sentence or two about this seminal SETI work, and keep on driving. In 1960, a 29-year-old named Frank Drake used this scope to peer at two nearby stars, just to see if maybe perhaps some cosmic beast was broadcasting from them. The no-longer-operational telescope is rusty, and so paint-chipped it looks almost heathered. Half a mile from the gate, McCarty pulls the Jeep up to an 85-foot radio dish called the Tatel telescope-the first stop on the SETI tour. And it came from partially closing the skies. That 20 percent had to come from somewhere. Today, Breakthrough’s SETI work uses (and pays for) about 20 percent of the telescope’s time.īut even moonshot-scale funding can’t magically create more hours in a day. So when entrepreneur Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Listen came to town with millions of dollars and 10-year backing, Green Bank bit ( according to investigations of the Paradise Papers, first released Sunday, Kremlin money helped back Milner's lucrative investments in Twitter and Facebook). With an ever-decreasing budget from the NSF-down to 60 percent of operating costs in 2017, and just 30 percent in 2018-the observatory needed alternative funding. Highlighting SETI history is kind of a departure for Green Bank, which has tried, if not to distance itself from extraterrestrial excitation, then to emphasize its work in more traditional radio astronomy: gas clouds, galaxies, supernova remnants, black holes, and other staid stuff.īut in 2012, the NSF began to talk about “divesting” itself from Green Bank, and spending its money instead on newer telescopes. I check my back pocket to make sure I left my phone behind. Soon, we’re driving toward the US GOVERNMENT PRIVATE PROPERTY gate, beyond which radio-blasting cell phones are totally, 100 percent prohibited. Learning about the history of alien hunting is risky business, after all. McCarty leads us toward a Jeep Liberty-diesel, so spark plugs won’t create radio waves that interfere with the telescope’s observations-and hands me a hard hat. And the visitor center director, Sherry McCarty, has agreed to give me the astronomy center’s new SETI tour ($40, reservations required). Rippled clouds hang low over the site’s hulking 100-meter radio dish, itself undergirded and overhung by bright white scaffolding. It’s a fallish day in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, the rural home of Green Bank Observatory and the world’s largest fully steerable telescope. ![]()
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